Ask HN: Why was a comment I made killed?
I wrote:
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From what I can tell there is no fee to send or receive payments with a limit capped at $500/month. Once a CC and bank account is verified, the limit could be either raised or removed at Amazon's discretion. A business account carries charges. Details are here: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees
The user agreement says that the difference between a personal account and a business account is that personal accounts may not receive credit card payments.
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I would not have known it was killed but for an email I received which I first regarded as suspicious, alerting me to the fact and telling me "It will probably look fine for you, but only other logged-in users with [showdead] turned on will see it. Try making another comment and see if it shows up when logged-out. If it got killed, you've been hellbanned." The user goes on to tell me that s/he sends out a few of these type of emails a month to people who get banned capriciously, but that my case is completely ridiculous.
I can only guess that perhaps there is some kind of filter on HN that picked up on something in my comment?
56 comments
[ 396 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadOr. Potentially a spam filter caught it; that would explain the behaviour (of appearing to you but not to others)
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees
[edit: this is a genuine question to establish a motive that might stop me flagging this and other content, this post is worthless clutter for all I can see]
[edit2: anyone care to explain their downvotes?]
a) What comments will be killed; and
b) What process will be followed to determine whether a comment is killed.
Sorry, but security through obscurity is no excuse for not making this stuff transparent.
Frankly, I don't care so much about the internal mechanisms used to kill posts. I just want to understand the policy; I have the showdead flag on and at least a quarter of the time, I can't for the life of me figure out why a comment was killed. That lack of transparency makes me uncomfortable.
I can see the rationale for it at some level but I really doubt that it has much effect, spammers are pretty good at monitoring the effect of their actions.
It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.
It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.
What? I've never heard about this. (Edit: Oh, I glossed over half the threadstarter's text.)
That's very well possible.
(edit: I doubt someone would go out of their way to alert a troll to being banned though)
> What? I've never heard about this.
You would have if you read the posting at the top of the page ;)
The problem is that HN has turned into a monster of a forum, and to know everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it functioning and to set up guidelines that navigate this perfectly is utopian. False positives and accidents happen, admins welcome reports of these, I don't get what the community gets out of them, though.
Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.
We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".
Who's to say that the guys on here http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't have some kind of uber-user power because of their high karma score?
We've already established in a number of threads over the past few months that some of these folks (to be left unnamed) have invested remarkable effort into attaining these scores and think very highly of themselves and don't feel the need to answer to anyone for their otherwise abusive behavior (like hitting the downvote cap %, or flagging users they don't like etc.).
More interesting is that the community discussion around those guys' behavior also showed interesting patterns in the way HN works. Eventually pg shows up and says something like "yeah well, if your karma is above 10k, and you have a 30% upvote surplus, and it's a thursday, you can kill user accounts, but only 2 a year, unless their name starts with a t,s,kh, or an odd number." and then somebody posts the relevant arc source for that.
We all then walk away scratching our heads as to why that's something built into the site, but we have no internal mail system or simple way of contacting the admins.
Anything else is just not there unless you know about it by other means.
When seeking assistance for a hellban of my very own, I was emailed by several helpful HN power users, all giving basically the same opinion -- "The HN moderation is capricious and deaf", in one user's words. That's an uncomfortable assessment from regular site contributors.
After I asked in #startups if someone would be so kind to submit it, I was suggested to mail to pg's email address. I did and received a dry "Ok, I unbanned you.".
You got the first part. Did you ever get an answer to the second part?
First, I agree with you that a more transparent process would be a positive thing.
Second, I'd like to highlight that this is by far the finest community I've ever been a part of for a long term period. I've seen other communities good for six months to a year before coming somewhat unglued, and Hacker News hasn't done that in the two years or so I've been here. So I agree with you, but also want to take a moment to thank the moderators for what is largely a thankless job, and for what they're largely doing incredible work with.
So, agree that improvements can be made, and still - a massive amount of gratitude from me. Actually, if there's any HN mods in whatever city I'm in at any given time, shoot me an email and lunch is on me. Taipei right now, seriously, you guys are amazing and thanks.
Maybe this is purely me, but having a month or two of my posts going down the black hole 1. saved people from my vitriol and 2. forced me to think about why it happend.
Now, I think there are too many people that will downmod a comment because they disagree with it, or because it responds to one of their comments in an unflattering (but appropriately toned) way. If this happens to you early on you get put in the kill list.
You also get kill-listed if you upmod a killed account too much, which is to prevent shill accounts I suppose.
The real way to tell, however, is that whenever you are logged in every page view takes 10 seconds or more to load.
Overall I think that all these shinanigans are pretty effective at knocking down the number of people who are just angry and bringing that anger to the site. They might be perfectly smart people, but there are plenty of smart people in the world, and people coming here to rage are such a huge negative that it is best if they are eliminated from the site, even if there are occationally people who get kill-listed 'unfairly'.
This is a BBS, not a criminal court. If you feel it is unwarranted you are banned from posting to a Bulletin board, my suggestion at that point would be to create another account and proceed rocking out from there. If you can't get over the injustice of being slighted by an automated system on a discussion board, then your priorities are incredibly retarded, and probably you should reflect on your life and figure out why? I should say that this isn't meant to be directed at anyone in particular, except maybe to me circa 2006.
TBH I'm just not interested. If you've got a problem with something that's happened to you ask pg. Don't come whining to the group.
And the user who is secretly emailing people about comments that have been deleted doesn't seem helpful either. They are working in a behind-the-scenes manner that could easily end up being counterproductive as some 'anti-HN' group gets formed by it.
It is almost always best to try to address problems with the people you are having a problem with.
Don't forget that to mail some millionaire that also happens to run a forum is something that people will simply perceive as intimidating. If there would be a documented route to 'message the admin' then I think these threads would vanish.
One thing I used to like about HN was how stuff like this just got genuine helpful responses and there was no worry about them existing.
I am guessing the number of people about here now means there are more of the threads, more make the front page and so forth (whereas before they were mostly the domain of the "new" page crowd)
Four links at the top, homepage will only take entries from hacking and startups, label your content wrong and you lose 50 karma points.
I do believe that you should be careful about asking stupid questions in public. But I don't think this was unexpected.
There are people here now who are here primarily for what passes for intelligent discussion these days -- myself among them. But, that doesn't quite match this site's original intended purpose, which was to become a point of community for potential YCombinator applicants.
So, if someone gets banned by mistake, or if there's some imbalance or some feature or tweak that HN maybe should have ... as long as it isn't negatively impacting YCombinator applications, then it really isn't worth a terrible amount of pg's time or attention.
It's an interesting situation - I don't blame PG or YC for their occasional failings. I expect they are surprised, and perhaps not in a 100% comfortable way, at the way the community, and expectations, have grown. Arguably HN is now too large to fulfil its purported function of screening YC applicants prior to interview.
That said, doesn't matter if you wanted the kid - once it's in your arms and screaming, a kid you have. I hope that PG is at least considering anointing some more moderators - "community selected" would be best - to take up the mantle when he doesn't have the time or inclination to take an in-depth interest in things. I certainly have some people in mind that I would gladly support being moderators, and I think they would gladly accept.
The HN story is quite fascinating, really. It's still the best we've got, seemingly completely by accident. Quite inspirational.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skwiddor
two admittedly poor taste posts, one a response to the other being modded down and I'm out
and they didn't tell me for two weeks but they let me dead post so no mods and no responses.
To echo hank777, the very fact that HN has this well known silent technique of "hellbanning" (new term to me) is going to drastically change my posture towards contributing.
(Just how, I can't say yet (too early in the morning), but it will be significant. I know from my behavior in other forums after I learned that they do this (e.g. GrokLaw) that I won't be making many more contributions, for this drastically changes the risk/reward ratio.)
It seems like the idea is to encourage the usual social-news-site groupthink, even though pg has publicly stated that he wants to avoid this. (The spaghetti-code that is news.arc is probably a contributing factor, but I digress...)
Anyway, I fully agree that having your comments auto-killed just for saying what you think - no matter how unpopular - should never happen.
Is it possible that there is some kind of low threshold for your karma after which all your comments get killed?
Because I'm fairly sure that I have said some pretty unpopular stuff here and afaik I am not dead.
Maybe it's not too smart to start antagonizing people right off the bat, before you have sufficient 'karma cushion' to survive a drive-by downmod or two.
How about only displaying the downmod button after you've answered someone?
It is weird that the "new" social news sites mess up moderation so badly. Slashdot solved this years ago; I never see spam on Slashdot. Nor do I see people being auto-killed there.
View the firehose at 'black' level and you'll see more spam than on hn, just a random sample:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=8811130&a...
The firehose is equivalent to the HN 'new' page.
If you only look at the homepage on HN you will never see spam.
As long as there are no repercussions for being detected by the filters and my HN account stays in good standing there is no need to for me to be concerned.
To the comments which suggested that this is not HN material and should have been addressed privately, I say that I did not suspect this post would receive as much attention as it did. I expected it to receive some sparse upvotes and an answer along the lines of "sensitive spam filter sometimes kills legitimate posts, known problem, nothing to be worried about". I did not want to clog up an admin's inbox querying it. I also wanted to check whether I was able to post.
This post, however, was killed because we can't have people submitting top level posts every time they want to complain about something being killed. If you have a question pertaining to your specific account, email us (info@ycombinator.com).